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I've always been interested in unusual phenomena in conscious experience-- events in consciousness that are novel, surprising, sublime, or just plain strange with respect to the normal waking consciousness in which we are usually ensconced. In the interest of exploring this topic, I'd like for this thread to become an ongoing log in which us PFers provide first person accounts of such anomalous experiences.
The recounted experiences can range from the mundane to the profound, the transient to the enduring, the rare to the recurring. They can issue from sleeplike states; states of emotional stress; extraordinary circumstances; psychoactive drugs; meditation; unusual, degraded, or heightened physiological or psychological functioning; extreme sensory deprivation or excitation; or they can be tied to some other factor or simply be apparently unexplained, random occurrences. Essentially, everything is fair game. Please don't be shy; what seems mundane and not worth mentioning to you could be quite interesting to someone else!
Some good, general guidelines to be mindful of: Try to be as detailed as possible in describing the nature of your experience, such that others will have a good sense of what the experience was like for you (perceptually, cognitively, and/or emotionally) and why it was anomalous. Also, it would be illuminating to mention external or internal factors that might have been relevant to the occurrence of the experience (e.g. was conducting so-and-so form of meditation, or had ingested such-and-such kind of drug, etc.).
The recounted experiences can range from the mundane to the profound, the transient to the enduring, the rare to the recurring. They can issue from sleeplike states; states of emotional stress; extraordinary circumstances; psychoactive drugs; meditation; unusual, degraded, or heightened physiological or psychological functioning; extreme sensory deprivation or excitation; or they can be tied to some other factor or simply be apparently unexplained, random occurrences. Essentially, everything is fair game. Please don't be shy; what seems mundane and not worth mentioning to you could be quite interesting to someone else!
Some good, general guidelines to be mindful of: Try to be as detailed as possible in describing the nature of your experience, such that others will have a good sense of what the experience was like for you (perceptually, cognitively, and/or emotionally) and why it was anomalous. Also, it would be illuminating to mention external or internal factors that might have been relevant to the occurrence of the experience (e.g. was conducting so-and-so form of meditation, or had ingested such-and-such kind of drug, etc.).